The Deep Left Hypothesis

Technology is centralization.

The Deep Left Hypothesis is the idea that technology is inherently a force of centralization, and therefore, leftism.

This is a broad statement, and there are plenty of libertarians who will take issue with it. What about Bitcoin? What about social media ghettoization and polarization? What about the internet conspiracy rabbit hole? What about the rise of individual liberty with the printing press and firearm?

Even if I were able to prove that all of these technologies tend toward centralization, I still need to convince you that the best definition of leftism is centralization. What about anarchists, localists, primitivists, and other decentralized forms of leftism? What about highly centralized right-wing governments, like Absolutist Monarchies, National Socialism, and theocracies?

I’ll deal with the question of technology first, and the question of centralization second.

language.

The first technology that I analyze is language. Language is a technology of centralization. Before I prove that, we should first drill down into the meaning of this mysterious word, “centralization.” What does this mean?

Centralization refers to the intensity of locus. To illustrate this, we can refer to a physical system. For example, a solar system where 99% of the mass is concentrated in the sun is a centralized system. Or, if you have a bowling pin, the mass of the pin is centralized at the bottom of the pin. It is not equally or randomly distributed throughout the volume of the pin.

In other words, centralization is a form of locational ordering. De-centralization, by contrast, is equivalent with entropy or chaos. In statistics, we use the word “correlation” and “noise” to refer to abstract forms of centralization.

Top charts: centralization / correlation. Bottom: noise / de-centralization.

We can also illustrate this in geographic terms. Life on Earth centralizes itself geographically around access to calories and nutrients. Plants grow where there is sunlight, water, and soil. Animals flourish where there are plants to eat. But the impact of technology has allowed humans to centralize even further, not around external resources, but around the human resource itself.

The first technology we can speak of is language. Language allows for information to be carried across time and space. Animals have forms of signaling which also help them carry information over time and space. Bees and ants, after they identify a source of food, bring that information back to the colony with pheromone trails and dances. Deer raise their white tails to signal danger. These are instinctual and genetic group evolutionary strategies to allow for the centralization of information across individuals within a herd or colony.

Language, however, is a technology, meaning that, strictly speaking, we aren’t born with it. It is an invention. But language has been with humans for so long (tens or even hundreds of thousands of years) that we have also genetically evolved to more quickly learn language, and more easily use it. This is a chicken-or-egg question. Did we first develop the genetics for language, or did we first develop the technology?

It sounds difficult to imagine that we developed the technology before the genetics. We know that animals cannot speak language, genetically. They do not have the cognitive capacity to memorize sufficient vocabulary and use syntax in a logical way, let alone the fine motor skills in the tongue and lips to make all of the requisite sounds. You can try to teach animals sign language, but it seems hard to make the jump from sign language to spoken language without evolving the genetics first.

But there are some cases where technology precedes genetics, and then influences genetics. For example, lactose tolerance developed after the domestication and milking of goats, sheep, and cows. People forced themselves to drink milk, despite the indigestion that resulted. Those who maintained their tolerance from infancy had less indigestion, which put them at an advantage.

We can imagine early humans forcing each other to speak. I will hypothesize here that the first forms of speech were actually forms of song and singing. We conceive of lyrics as a component of songs, and songs as being more complex than mere lyrics, because they have the added elements of rhythm, speed, tempo, and pitch. However, songs are actually easier to memorize than mere words alone. This indicates that singing is more “natural” than “flat affected” words alone.

This shouldn’t be too surprising, since many animals sing, like birds and insects. The first human speech would have been in the form of song, with simple sounds like “oh, ah, ee, oo!” These simple sounds would be repeated, like Morse Code, in various rhythmic chants and mantras, with different pitches to signify different meanings.

Without being too crude, sexual experience reveals the deep instinctual memory of this kind of primitive singing language. Women seem to have a deeper connection to this function than men. This is likely because, for most of human history, women seem to have been under greater pressure for social competency than men, whereas men seem to have been under greater pressure for physical competency.

Besides sex noises, humans continue to express these primitive forms of language in fearful screams, angry shouts, victorious whoops, surprised exclamations, joyous outcries, and depressed wailing. From these basic elements, more complicated combinations resulted in something approaching “acapella.” From acapella, language developed.

Language is a significant improvement over genetic signaling because it allowed for a greater diversity, quality, and quantity of information transfer. If we understand the terms “correlation” and “centralization” to be synonyms in this context, then the emergence of language allowed for the correlation of information throughout a tribe, and therefore, its centralization.

Anyone who has sung a song in a group can activate these deep primordial feelings of centralization, of group-think, of belonging. It is a mysterious and wonderful feeling to be part of a choir. Eventually, this technology had genetic effects, with the most skilled singers gaining sexual capital and more successfully passing on their genes. This is probably why musicians, to this very day, get laid. It’s the compliment we pay to our ancestors for the invention of language.

I really have no clue when exactly language developed. I assume it was some point in the last 400,000 years, after we diverged from Neanderthals. However, it’s entirely possible that the process occurred over a slow and laborious development rather than a punctuated equilibrium. If language did develop quickly, I would expect it to arise between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago, because that would correlate with our expansion out of Africa.

One of the consistent confusions I get when explaining this theory is between centralization and speciation. Speciation is a result of successful centralization. This seems like a contradiction, or at least an irony. The solution to this riddle is to understand that success is the mother of speciation, and centralization is the grandmother of success. Humans who adopted language were extremely successful, because of the power of informational correlation and centralization. As a result, they were able to expand, colonize, migration, and eventually to speciate into different groups as they attained sufficient distance from one another. Whereas early humans were probably all remarkably similar, post-language humans started to develop radically different traits as a result of the large geographic distances between them.

Again, I understand that this could be a confusing argument. If I’m suggesting that technology is all about centralization, and language is a technology, then why did language result in humans spreading outward from Africa and differentiating or speciating into different populations?¹ It seems like language allowed humans to become more diverse. This is the paradox of success. Successful technologies do allow for expansion, and when expansion reaches a certain limit, it results in speciation.

For example, the British Empire was so successful that it was able to colonize North America, South Africa, India, and Australia. On the one hand, the inability of the British to maintain control of these colonies meant that many different countries gained their independence from Britain, thus speciating. On the other hand, all these former colonies continue to speak English, and this dominance of English around the world has reinforced decisions within the EU to emphasize English education. So even while the success of the British had resulted in some kind of political speciation, it has still linguistically and economically centralized the world on the English language as never before. Never before in history has one language dominated such a large percentage of the global population.

Similarly, as humans left Africa, the growing geographical separation allowed humans to develop in radically different ways. But all of those humans spoke language, which would eventually allow for the next technology:

art and religion.

Myth can be thought of as a “meta-language.” Generative Anthropology, following Girard, addresses the “is-ought” gap in language by differentiating between the ostensive, the imperative, and the declarative. The ostensive refers to a gesture, like pointing toward danger. The ostensive brings attention to a threat, but relies upon the individual’s flight response and does not provide it externally. The imperative refers to a command, like pointing toward a prey species, with a greater sense of external force. It is not merely bringing into view an object, but implicitly suggesting or coordinating action from outside an instinctual framework. Finally, the declarative makes statements about the world without any necessary immediate action — it is abstract and descriptive. The jump from the imperative to the declarative is difficult, but religion and myth can help us understand the bridge between the two.

Just as language contains building blocks — sounds, syllables, phonemes, words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books — myth also has building blocks. According to Jung, the simplest and most basic building block of myth is the symbol, like the cross, or the ouroboros. At this juncture, we discover something astounding: one of the earliest forms of religion is the depicted symbol.

This seems chronologically inaccurate, since written words and alphabets probably originate around 6,000 BC, but religion seems to be much older. When I say “depicted symbol,” I am simply referring to what we would call “art.”

The oldest example of depicted symbols might be 82,000 year old shell beads from Morocco. This is interesting, since it contradicts a lot of nationalistic or racist theories about the origins of behavioral modernity. It’s not quite European; it’s far from the fertile crescent; and it’s the furthest you can get from Ethiopia while still being in Africa.² This may be because Morocco was a meeting point for two types of humans, Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals, but with unique geographic opportunities for isolation and experimentation. It’s also possible that in the coming decades we will find even older forms of depicted symbols in an entirely different region of the world.

From these shell beads, we later move onto cave paintings, which are no longer mere symbols, but full blown archetypes. A shell bead doesn’t inherently represent anything; it’s just a symbol of something (wealth, beauty, youth, power). But cave paintings represent living creatures, such as animals and humans. They (potentially) have personality.

Finally, around 10,000 BC, you get the art of Göbekli Tepe, which seems to blow everything else out of the water. Again, this was only discovered in 1963, so it’s entirely possible that we could discover even older sites at some point in the future. But for now, Göbekli Tepe looks like the first evidence of full-blown centralized religion, beyond mere tribal units.

Centralized religion allows for a few new things:

1. The enslavement of people by threatening them with divine punishment;

2. Escaping the confines of Dunbar’s Number;

3. Agriculture.

agriculture.

Agriculture is possible to start without a large number of people. However, as settled populations grow, they need some way to negotiate the threat of “strangers,” which is not something humans are instinctively capable of.

Agriculture is not possible to start, however, without slavery. Humans must be enslaved in order to farm, because early farming amounted to a form of dietary abuse. Early farming populations were short, had rotting teeth, and shorter life spans than hunter-gatherers. No one would voluntarily adopt such a life. Only religious compulsion was capable of using a system of punishments and rewards to overcome the natural aversion to dietary abuse. Since that point, humans have somewhat genetically evolved to be more tolerant of agricultural diets, but vegans still suffer from a number of dietary deficiencies, including Vitamin D (in northern climates), protein, and iron deficiencies.

It should be obvious that agriculture is a centralizing force. It forces people to become settled in a particular area, rather than being nomadic. It forces adherence to a calendar for planting and harvesting, which becomes the basis of the astrological calendar.

Around 5600 BC, something interesting happened around the Black Sea. What was previously a freshwater lake suddenly becomes salt water. My hypothesis is that the Euxine Lake preceded the Black Sea, and was the basis of a lost agricultural civilization. When the lake flooded with salt water, it destroyed a system of canals that branched out from the lake, and resulted in a huge number of refugees. These refugees then assimilated into cultures throughout the world, and spread the myth of a “global flood.”

After this Euxine collapse, civilization eventually re-emerged in Egypt, Sumer, and the Indus River Valley. But during these 1600 years, the nomadic steppe peoples were also developing a new technology: the horse.

horses.

The domestication of the horse flies in the faces of the Urban Theory of technological development, which go something like this:

1. Technology is a function of intelligence;

2. Intelligence is best modeled as a bell curve;

3. If you have more people, you’re statistically more likely to have geniuses;

4. Therefore, the areas with the most people will have the most geniuses;

5. As a result, the most densely populated urban centers will have the most inventions.

Yet horses were domesticated in the middle of nowhere. How is this possible?

One explanation is that when elites from the Euxine Civilization fled as refugees, they assimilated into new cultures. When they went south, into the Middle East, they assimilated into large cultures with large populations, and were demographically swamped. However, those who went north or east, into the Steppe, found these regions relatively empty. Therefore, the Euxine people were able to best maintain their particular culture and history on the steppe, as opposed to the Middle East, where they were largely swallowed up by competing agricultural cultures.

I am assuming here that the Euxine refugees were culturally advanced when compared with other peoples of the world. What exactly this means is not entirely clear: did they have more advanced math? Symbology? Calendars? Religion? Language? All of the above? And how would any of this help them domesticate horses? What sort of skills would be useful for figuring out how to domesticate horses?

Without getting too specific, let’s return to the original assumption of the Urban Theory: more intelligence equals more invention. If we assume that these Euxine refugees were somewhat like Einstein fleeing the Holocaust, then it is possible that they were highly selected for intelligence. This is why the remnant which best preserved itself (not in the Middle East, but on the steppe) was so surprisingly inventive, despite a much lower population density than the Middle East.

We should also recognize that the steppe is simply where horses lived, so proximity is a huge factor, more so than intelligence.

Whatever factors led to the domestication of horses, they resulted in an entirely new form of civilization.

the tripartite class system.

The earliest humans were all tribal communists. They had no concept of private property, and shared everything with their tribal family. The invention of agriculture and religion, however, expanded society past the tribal level, and allowed for the formation of a managerial-priest class. This managerial-priest class oversaw the slaves who worked in the fields and conducted all the religious rituals.

One day, however, a thundering horde of angry nomads came storming out of the steppe and flooded into agricultural civilization. Despite being small in number, they were an unstoppable military force. After conquering half of Eurasia, from India to Ireland, they reorganized these agricultural societies into a new system of three classes, also known as the Indo-European tripartite class system.

This social structure placed the warriors at the top (descendants of the conquering aristocracy), the priests in the middle, and the farm managers at the bottom of the nobility. Below these three classes existed the slaves or serfs, who were regarded as somewhat less than human.

As I have stated before, success leads to speciation. So while Indo-European societies were not centralized, and quickly speciated into a number of different city-states, the expansion of Indo-European culture across Eurasia resulted in a wide-scale religious project of mythological systematization.

My hypothesis is that pre-Indo-European religions were relatively simple. There was a rain God, because rain was important for agriculture. There was an earth God, because earth was important for agriculture. And maybe there would be some other Gods, but they would never be as important as the rain and Earth Gods.

Indo-Europeans, by contrast, didn’t care about that at all. They had two primary Gods: the sun God and the storm God. This is represented in Greek as Apollo and Zeus; in Norse as Baldr and Thor; in Sanskrit as Surya and Indra. As Indo-Europeans tried to figure out how to reconcile their two Gods with the two Gods of the agriculturalists, they invented this concept of a “messenger God,” who would serve as a mediator of the conflict between the two cultures. In Greece this was Mercury, in Norse this was Odin, and in Sanskrit this was Agni.

Going back to the agriculturalists, they didn’t lose their Gods, but they got demoted. Uranus is the Greek God of the rainy heavens, but he becomes irrelevant after Zeus takes over. Vishnu is the Sanskrit God of the universal rainy heavens, but he is overshadowed in the Rig Veda by Indra, strongest of the Gods. In Norse, there is seemingly no important rainy God at all, and this may be because agriculture was least developed in Scandinavia when compared with Greece or India.

The agriculturalists also kept their Earth Gods, such as Pluto, Gaia, and Demeter in Greece; Prithvi and Yama in Sanskrit; and Jord and Hel in Norse. One of the reasons why the Gods of the earth are associated with the “underworld” and death is because the Indo-Europeans probably practiced two forms of funeral: cremation and Kurgan burial. The Kurgan burial was extremely expensive, and reserved for nobility, while cremation was the preferred method of funeral for most people. It seems possible that, as Indo-Europeans spread their culture throughout the world, they may have inspired the building of pyramids.³

Because the Indo-European funeral rites didn’t overlap with agriculturalist burial rites, the agriculturalists weren’t in direct competition with the Indo-Europeans, and they got to keep their death Gods. Indo-Europeans seemed to think that the “natives” went to their death God, underground, but they, as the nobility, would go to somewhere sunny, like Valhalla. This is the origin of the Christian belief that the good go to shining heaven, while the evil go to hell underground.

However, the warrior dominance of agricultural societies wasn’t going to last forever.

philosophy.

Finally, after using alphabets for hundreds of years, Indo-European societies started to write down their myths. The Greeks were the first of the Indo-Europeans to begin to write poetry, myths, and literature, which they attributed to Hesiod and Homer, their two earliest authors. As literacy expanded, this allowed for independent authors to begin to conduct independent philosophy.

Once again, the emergence of philosophy sounds like an opportunity for the divergence of opinion, not centralization or uniformity. But precisely because philosophy divorced itself from tradition, it was able to cut across cultural lines. Pythagoras famously traveled the world and borrowed from all sorts of traditions, combining them together. This was the origin of world religion, or multi-cultural religion, in its earliest form.

Although Platonism never supplanted Indo-European religion, it did directly lead to the conquests of Alexander and the establishment of the world’s first multi-continental empire. Alexander conquered four great civilizations: Greece, Syria, Persia, and Egypt. Alexander was tutored by Aristotle, a student of Plato. Although philosophy is now dismissed as stuffy and useless, ancient philosophy should be thought of as “natural philosophy,” or science, rather than as an inane diatribe on the number of angels that can fit on the head of a pin.

After Alexander conquered the Levant, Judaism was invented. This is somewhat controversial, since Jews maintain that their religion was started by Abraham. However, this kind of historical falsification should not surprise us, considering how easily it was carried out in the 19th century with the invention of Mormonism. Judaism should be seen as a descendant of Platonism, and thus, the “Abrahamic tradition” is a product of Indo-European civilization (including Islam).

It should not be difficult to understand that Abrahamism, as a product of Platonism, has had an incredible track record of centralizing humanity. From out of millions of little obscure traditions, rituals, and sects, Abrahamism has bound billions of humans all across the globe together into a single mythological tradition.

Expanding literacy.

Through Christianity, the ideal of the Platonic academy was partially realized. Academies were built all over Europe for the purpose of studying the Bible. Eventually, with the Renaissance, education expanded to include pagan sources. Finally, the printing press allowed books to be quickly and cheaply reproduced, which contributed to the Protestant Reformation.

Yet all of these developments, again, seem to have some aspect of speciation to them. I have argued this repeatedly, but I am afraid I may not have convinced you of the link between speciation and centralization. Whereas the Catholic church was centralized and global in scope, the Protestant churches got rid of Latin and split up the Bible into national languages. But this itself was an act of centralization.

Prior to Luther, there was no united German language, in literary terms. By printing the Bible in “German,” Luther established, for the first time, a uniform and official way to write the “High German” language, which was previously a diverse assortment of dialects.⁴

While this was going on in Germany, France, which never became Protestant, was influenced by these developments and embarked on its own journey of nationalization. The regional differences between the French were stamped out, with Occitan regionalism and localism being supplanted by centralization from Paris.

So yes, the revolution of Protestantism did, from a certain perspective, remove the universal glue of Catholicism, and hurt the power of that global institution. But Protestantism, in supporting nationalism, helped to remove regional differences within countries, and make them more centralized.

guns.

The technology of guns eliminated the need for knights on horses with armor, and replaced them with mercenary or eventually conscripted citizen armies. In this sense, guns were egalitarian, and helped incentivize the creation of democratic ideologies and civic religions that would mobilize and motivate the conscription of citizens. Napoleon, following the French Revolution, made use of these ideologies to conquer most of Europe. He failed, but he demonstrated the power of democratic ideology in military terms.

internet.

It is true that the internet can make people feel atomized and lonely, or that it leads to political polarization. I would compare this to the effect of Protestantism on Europe. Yes, Catholicism was demoted as a universal glue holding Christendom together. But Protestantism increased nationalism, which helped erode local and regional identities, and overall contributed to more centralization of identity than Catholicism. Similarly, when people online become polarized, they are polarizing along an axis of left vs right, as opposed to South vs North or East vs West. In other words, the internet is helping to eliminate regional identities, and creating new forms of identity along a binary, no matter what state you come from.

crypto.

Libertarians love crypto, and they believe it is the best technology to protect individual liberty against the centralizing effects of big government. However, in divesting from any national currency, crypto currency has the potential to act as a truly universal and global currency. While in political terms it is resistant to certain forms of legal centralization, in economic terms, it is a tool to help further centralize the global economy.

Is centralization leftism?

Anarchists are useful idiots for the forces of centralization. Anarchism has many different forms, but in general, it is a critique of the aristocracy and the clergy. By critiquing aristocrats (or old money), and the clergy (or old religion), anarchists are helping to degrade old power structures (like the nation state), which makes it easier for internationalism to grow.

Ideologies like primitivism and localism exist in a technical sense, but they have no political power. Ted Kaczynski has a great deal of emotional appeal among young people, because the process of centralization is painful and involves dehumanization and the loss of identity and local culture. Yet as a pragmatist, Kaczynski offered no practical explanation of how technology could be limited or rolled back.

Still, Kaczynski is valuable to read because he definitively ties together leftism with technology. He calls leftists “oversocialized,” but we could also say that leftists are “hyper conformists,” where conformism is a type of centralization. We could also say that socialization is a technology, akin to religion, and to be oversocialized is to be hyper-religious. Whereas right-wingers are only moderately socialized (religious), left-wingers are oversocialized (hyper-religious).

What about Nazis?

If centralization is always left-wing, then why do some right-wing ideologies promote centralization? The explanation is that, generally speaking, this mis-match has more to do with superficial definitions or a lack of context.

For example, Absolute Monarchies tended to be friendlier to progressive, tolerant, and non-religious discourse than traditional monarchies. Hence, the Enlightenment thinkers advocated for “Enlightened Despotism,” because this form of centralization allowed for them to more easily critique Christianity.

Leftism is cannibalistic: Christianity begins as a leftist project, and later becomes old-hat, and is later defeated by Critical Theory (a descendant of Christianity). Similarly, technology does the same thing: cars replace horses. What was once revolutionary (the horse) becomes considered “traditional” when it is replaced by the car.

What about Nazis though? Surely they prove that the right-wing can outdo the left in terms of centralization. It is true that the Nazis were relatively right-wing when compared to the current global economy, which is highly centralized on New York City and London and the English language. However, for their time, the Nazis were remarkably non-Christian and non-aristocratic. Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, Borman, and Goering were all non-Christians with no aristocratic background. Compare that to FDR and Churchill, who were both ostensible Christians with a prestigious family pedigree. By the standard of aristocracy and clergy, the Nazis were fairly egalitarian (within their Aryan conception of Europeanness).

Had Naziism survived WWII, it may very well have inhibited certain forms of globalization and leftism. But in the grand scheme of history, if we define leftism as transgressing borders, cannibalizing religion with science, promoting technology, equality of women, eliminating aristocracies, and creating new religions, then Naziism was much more leftist than Napoleon, for example.

If this argument is not convincing to you, that is ok. You can simply put Naziism in some sort of “metaphysical exception” category to the rest of the theory. If you selectively ignore Naziism, the rest of the theory holds up nicely.

This is scary!

Most people find centralization frightening, because it implies the loss of identity, the cannibalization of religion, and the theft of local autonomy from regional government toward unaccountable, bureaucratic, abstract, alienating and incomprehensible forces. These are natural concerns, and every victory of leftism, centralism, and technology comes with some cost.

The next big technology that I anticipate furthering this process is bio-technology and transhumanism. The most common objection I get to this theory is not that it is empirically wrong, but that it is disgusting. God made us man and woman, not as bugmen and Mentat. Transhumanism threatens the very form of humanity itself. Are we going to end up as brains in jars? Are we going to lose our ability to reproduce, and be engineered in big chemical vats?

I will try to alleviate some of these concerns. First of all, I think that EMP technology is going to destroy all silicon hardware as a matter of military strategy. We are going to return to purely carbon based tech (DNA) and throw out all our computers. Primitivists rejoice! This may be a fantasy of mine based on the plot of Dune, but I genuinely believe that silicon based technology is extremely fragile, and DNA makes a lot of sense as an engineering tool.

Cells are the best form of nano-tech we have. They are very hard to understand and engineer, but I think that is our ultimate destiny. As we’ve experimented with robotics, we seem to just recreate animal forms, like dogs.

This reminds me of convergent evolution, where both the triceratops and the rhinoceros converge on a certain form, despite one coming from a lizard and the other from a rat. It’s my belief that there is something approaching the ideal form of a human, and even if we started with some kind of weird looking overly specialized brain in a jar, we would eventually reinvent human beings by necessity.

This is either because I have faith in God that he made us perfectly, or I have faith in evolution as an iterative algorithm for successfully solving the problem of the optimal form of life.

There are aspects of this which are certainly wrong: there are opportunities for slavery and specialization, where we create lifeforms destined to engage in one specific repetitive task. Would this be far worse than “normal slavery”? After all, these specialized bio-machines wouldn’t yearn for a better life, since their brain chemistry would be perfectly suited to the task at hand.

I also think that, in the near term, people are too brain-rotten with sci-fi. Bio-Tech doesn’t mean immediately putting a brain in a vat. It means marginal gains in intelligence of maybe 15 points for humans who are otherwise genetically, psychologically, and physically identical to you and me. They might look a little more handsome or healthy, but I don’t expect bio-tech to start producing Animorphs within our lifetimes. Hope that makes you feel less scared.

Additionally, even if we did such a thing, you probably weren’t going to make it anyway, genetically speaking. Most people throughout history were not genetically successful. At any given point in history, if you point to a random individual, that individual is not going to pass on their genes. This effect compounds over generations, such that after 500 years, 90% of people just don’t exist in biological terms. They were, sadly, genetic dead ends. Bio-tech might accelerate this process, but it doesn’t fundamentally alter the cruel Darwinian rules which have been in place for billions of years.

Sure, the vastness of time and space is a scary concept if you are an atheist with no sense of spirituality. If you believe we have souls, then the body and this material reality is just a certain set of fashionable clothes that we are trying on for a short time. If it looks ugly to you, just wait till you die and end up in another universe.

Honestly, if you’re an atheist and you’re complaining to me about how disgusted you are about trans-humanism, I think you have bigger problems, like random genetic drift over time, which is absolutely and certainly going to alter the form of humans in millions of years (if we survive that long). You won’t recognize your descendants, even if all 1,000 generations of grandkids successfully reproduce at 2.1 TFR. They will look weird. Sorry. I like how people look too.

But that doesn’t mean people will look ugly. Look at a lion. A lion is beautiful. If humans genetically drift to look more like lions over time, I think that would be cool. I embrace our human-lion hybrid overlords. That is actually the traditionalist position. Horseshoe theory! Conservatives rejoice!

The fulfillment of 40,000 years of dreaming.

1. I’m using the term “speciate” merely to mean “differentiate,” not to mean that there were distinct biological species of humans arising due to language (although that may have have happened 2 million years ago).

2. This is in terms of travel distance in terms of time, not merely in terms of miles. Remember the difficulty of traversing the Saharan Desert.

3. Of course, it’s also possible that pyramids were invented by multiple people in multiple places independently of one another. Otherwise we have to imagine the Indo-Europeans reached America, and there’s no evidence for that.

4. High and Low German refer to the proximity to Rome. High was closer, Low was farther. The alternative explanation is that Low German existed at a lower elevation, whereas High German existed in mountainous regions.